mistakes, this is not from any defect in that precious instinct. It does its office when it makes you desire your own approbation. It is the office of benevolence, and of the sympathies, and the understanding, to show you what to do, and what to avoid doing, to deserve that approbation. For, inasmuch as it requires the aid of various outward senses to test the nature of a physical object-the sight to distinguish its colours-the feeling its texture-the smell its odour-the taste its flavour-so does it require the concurrence of various mental powers to test the moral qualities of actions. Benevolence, as I have already pointed out, shows you, by the instinctive pleasure you feel in seeing pleasure, and by the instinctive pain you feel in seeing pain, that causing happiness is right, and that causing suffering is wrong; your human sympathies explain to you that others feel as you do. Your understanding-that is, the mental power which naturally without any teaching sees the connection between causes and their effects-shows you not only how to cause happiness, and how to avoid causing pain, but, by enabling you to trace probable consequences beforehand, prevents your being deceived by what may seem for the moment pleasure to yourselves or others, but which is calculated to draw after it a train of evil consequences, as all departures from moral order, however trifling they may appear at first, you find upon reflection are likely to do. Now each one of you having these moral instincts and powers of perception, of memory, and of reflection in your own natural minds, you are able, and therefore responsible to use them; and by their use to come to this rational conclusion, whether you have been taught the letters of the alphabet or not.

Much easier, no doubt, is the task of those who, having been instructed in scriptural revelation, have all these moral conclusions made for them and given to them in explicit commandments from God. Such persons also being thus taught that the disapprobation of their own conscience represents that of God, the voice of their conscienee has greater authority. But my immediate object, as I have stated in the commencement of this essay, is to prove to those who are without this or any other assistance from without, that even they are still responsible beings in consequence of their possession of the range of faculties which constitute a human mind, and by means of which every human being, however unlettered, carries about with him in his own breast a direct revelation of the intentions of the Mind which made his mind.

Examine again your own thoughts, and you will find within you a natural faculty which not only can admire, but which cannot help admiring goodness, and kindness, and honesty in others, even though you may often, from want of early right habits, do wrong yourselves.

Now observe, that when the mind yields itself to this admiration of goodness, the feeling immediately arouses the natural instinct I have already described, which craves for your own approbation as naturally as a hungry man craves for food; and thus urges you to strive to imitate this goodness which has inspired you with admiration. You do not always, it is true, obey this impulse (for if you did you would soon be perfect beings), but you are not quite satisfied with yourselves while you resist the impulse. Here then, you see in the natural faculty which admires, in the natural faculty which so craves for your own approbation as to urge you to strive to imitate what you admire, or be dissatisfied with yourself till you do so manifest a design on the part of the Great Mind of the universe to draw you towards virtue of a still more exalted nature than the mere avoidance of great crimes.

Here again it must be admitted, that the task is rendered infinitely easier to those who are assisted by the practical revelation addressed to the veneration of the Christian world in the life of the Saviour, devoted to instructing the ignorant, healing the sick, soothing the afflicted, and doing good in every way; and thus displaying the attributes of a good and merciful God made visible in action upon earth, and clothed in a human form to render their imitation by human beings more possible.

Yet those who have not this assistance are not, therefore, released from their responsibility, for they still have their natural conscience.

This it is that makes the eye of the guilty man fear to meet the eye of his fellow-men. This it is that makes the features of the guilty man grow hateful from the expression they cannot avoid acquiring of conscious degradation, and wicked hatred and defiance of those whose happiness he knows he is lesseningwhose comfort he knows he is disturbing-whose just resentment he knows he is incurring by his invasions of moral order: for, as I have shown you, though he may not know the letters of the alphabet, the natural powers of his mind which I have described to you, acting upon his experience, have compelled him to see that evil consequences to some one have followed on all his evil acts; and his human sympathies, in despite of all his efforts to smother them, have compelled him to feel, that, by making others suffer what he would not like to suffer himself, he has put enmity between himself and them. It is in vain for him to plead ignorance; God has so made his soul that he cannot exist surrounded by the commonest occurrences of life, and remain in the dark.

And thus his natural conscience, though no human being but himself should know his guilt, has authority sufficient to punish him on the spot, by making him discontented, restless, and full of vague apprehensions, notwithstanding that he has never been taught (by precepts from without) to know that this reproving

voice of conscience, this constant looker-on at every passing thought, represents thus within the breasts of all the omnipresence of Him who sees the heart.

Wicked men, 'tis true, strive to brave their consciences by riotous conduct and loud laughter; but did any one of you ever see the eye of the wicked man dance with real heart-felt joy? Did any one of you ever see the smile of real peaceful happiness on his lips? Never!

Self-respect, on the other hand, being the natural voice of an approving conscience-the natural reward of honest and kind intentions, no one who has not forfeited his claim to the feeling by offending his conscience ought to be without such self-respect, however unimportant his adventitious rank in society may be.

This self-respect, founded in the first place on the possession of your human nature, which marks your rank in creation, should rise in proportion as you make a good use of those natural powers. Many of you, though poor and unlettered, have so used your human instincts and human sympathies, that you have acted kindly in all your family and neighbourly relations; and so used your natural understandings, that you have observed the consequences of actions-reflected upon these consequences-tested them by your moral instincts, and made out for yourselves a plain, direct, moral common-sense, which has made you so far good judges of straightforward right and wrong, that you have seen that injustice always gives some one pain, and that lying always robs some one of the use of his judgment in avoiding pain; so that, thus enlightened, the natural instinct which craves for your own approbation has urged you to be honest and just in all your dealings, and true in all your words; because, you could not satisfy this your natural conscience, and feel happy and comfortable without being so. Such of you as are thus practising patient industry for the support of your families, and resisting the sore temptations of poverty for conscience sake, are worthy of the very greatest respect, nay, admiration, for there is heroism in the virtue of a poor man; and, in this case, the poorer and the more unlettered the man is, the greater the respect and veneration due to him, for goodness under such difficult circumstances is greatness indeed! I said unlettered, not ignorant, for I will not call him ignorant whom God himself has thus wonderfully taught, through his natural faculties and instincts acting upon the natural relations of existence. Yet some of you, because you are poor, and destitute of book-learning and curious and ornamental instruction, are apt to confound yourselves with your condition, and lose a portion of your self-respect. But this is a mistake to be carefully avoided; for, it not only deprives you of your just reward, but also of a great support of virtue, and thus subjects you to fall into degrading vices, and really forfeit that self-respect as

well as respect from others, to which you had else been so eminently entitled under every outward circumstance, however unfavourable.

He who has found out how to be honest and kind possesses that wisdom without which all other knowledge gives but the power to do evil the more effectually. Seek, therefore, all of you, first the wisdom which is virtue; for then only will the knowledge which is power (whenever you are able to obtain such) become a means of doing good.

A well-meant zeal for education, and in some perhaps, pity for those deprived of its blessings, may have produced this erroneous doctrine of the non-responsibility of persons thus unfortunately circumstanced. But short-sighted indeed, and insulting to you was the friendship of those who thought thus degradingly of you, and who strove so to degrade you in your own opinion, as to believe, and endeavour to make you believe, that you had no position in creation--no dignity as human beings, but were the mere creatures of outward circumstances; and that these outward circumstances could reduce you, with all the noble apparatus of mind which you possess, to the level of the brutes, and bridge over that immeasurable distance-a distance so immensely greater than that between the mightiest potentate and poorest beggar-the distance between the responsible human being, furnished with moral and intellectual faculties, and human instincts, and human sympathies, and, above all, with an insatiable craving for his own respect, and the non-responsible brutes, with their animal instincts moving them mechanically towards the appetites and operations necessary to animal existence, and resting satisfied in these as an end. While man, even when unenlightened, or worse, when led astray-ever ambitious, be it for a bauble-ever enthusiastic, be it for a fallacy-ever ready to sacrifice the interests or the life of the body to the ambitious struggles of the soulever longing for his own good opinion and that of others to raise him in his own estimation, evidences thus, by his very errors, the superior order and nobler destination of his being; a being which, when that instinctive craving is enlightened, when that instinctive ambition is directed to worthy objects, is capable of becoming a reflection of all that can be conceived as the attributes of a God.

On this superiority of nature let the humblest of human beings place his foot firmly; and thence, by cultivating those natural powers, the possession of which give him his rank in creation, strive to rise in virtue and in self-respect daily, whether he receive aid from without or not. There are many unfavourable circumstances, no doubt, especially the want of moral training in in fancy, and the evil training you receive from bad people in childhood, which make the task of many of you very difficult; and therefore, where they exist, render you objects of compassion,

and make it the imperative duty of those who have the power to do so to amend your circumstances; but, while those circumstances do not make your task impossible (which nothing but insanity or idiotism can do), they do not release you from your natural responsibility.

A responsibility which is increased by living in a partly civilized country, in which, however far from perfect its standard of morals may be-however lamentably its national education may be neglected, yet the general voice of indignation against great crimes expressed by penal laws and public punishments, and the general disapprobation of disorderly conduct evinced by the difficulty which disorderly persons find in getting employed, must greatly assist the natural powers of the human mind in forming an approximation to a just moral common-sense, and thus increase the responsibility of all who live in a partly civilized country, however unfavourable their own individual circumstances may be. Even the very necessity which bad people are under of perpetrating their crimes in secret, is a species of moral training to themselves and to their unhappy children.

Now, though no want of aid from without can release any human being from his natural responsibility, yet a few words of plain advice from any friend who, possessing leisure, may have studied the subject, would very greatly assist you all in forming a moral common-sense from those materials which you possess within your own minds. Let me be that friend; let me endeavour to give you, as far as I am able, those few words of advice which, I can honestly say, I am prompted to offer you by one of the very faculties I owe to that human nature which I share with you— namely, the natural impulse which makes us desire each other's happiness.

CHAPTER II.

Cultivation of the moral faculties in adults.

If then, instead of forfeiting the self-respect which, in the first instance, you have a right to found on the possession of your human nature, you would greatly increase it, and cause it to grow into an approving conscience, representing the approbation of God, and entitling you to the respect and love of all good men, you will, notwithstanding your having been neglected in childhood, now, with your adult powers of mind, cultivate in yourselves, and cause to be cultivated in your children, the moral and intellectual faculties which are necessary to the formation of a perfect moral-sense or enlightened conscience; and which will thus teach natural conscience, or the natural instinct which craves